The Common Thread (26 page)

“Jeannie, do you want to come with me or stay here?” Jet asked.

“Are you okay by yourself?”

Jet nodded. “I’ll be fine. The initial shock is over.”

“Okay, then you go. I’d like to talk to Nic.”

Nic watched Jet’s back disappear through the lounge door, uncomfortable in the silence. Finally, Jeannie spoke. “Nicole, listen to me. Your parents did nothing wrong. They’ve loved you—”

“Couldn’t they have told me? When I think of all the times I said my prayers at night, begging God for a brother or sister, I…I…I could scream!”

“It was evident by the time you were two years old that reasoning with you would be a challenge. They couldn’t have told you without breaking their promise to the Finans. You’d have hopped on your bike and ridden to Philly to try to find her.”

Nic sniffed. “That’s probably true. But when I got older, I wouldn’t have done that.”

“When you got older, Katie’s life was a mess. I didn’t even know where she was for about four years after she ran away.”

“She ran away? Like seriously?”

“Oh, yeah. It hasn’t been a picnic for her.”

“So, is the news right? Did she shoot her boyfriend?”

“No, she didn’t shoot him. Whoever shot him came back and got Katie tonight.”

Nic rubbed away the tension that had formed at both temples, trying to ward off the migraine she felt coming. “Wow. I don’t know what else to say.”

Nic looked at Rae. All the while they’d been talking Rae had been beside her, silently supporting her with a hand on the back and a pat now and then. Nic offered her a little smile. “I guess you’ll never forget this date, huh?”

Rae nodded. “This is going down in history, just like that time you met your ex at Dalessandro’s.”

Nic couldn’t hold back a laugh, but it was bitter.

“Nic, do you want to see her?” Jeannie asked.

Nic rubbed her forehead as she pondered the question. “I don’t know proper etiquette for a situation like this. But I suppose I should, huh?”

“It’s up to you. No pressure here.”

“Will you come with me?” she asked Jeannie, then looked to Louis. “You, too?”

When they both nodded, Nic turned to Rae. “Can you wait for me?”

“Of course.”

Nic and Jeannie followed Louis through the doors into the sterile, cold environment of the SICU. It was like an anthill, bustling with activity, people hurrying in every direction. It was brightly lit, and the lights immediately caused Nic to cringe as the migraine began to take hold.

Louis took them to room three, where Jet sat at the bedside, holding a small hand in her large one. Nic took one step toward the bed and then stopped as she saw Katie’s face, the mirror image of her own, but pale and sickly and penetrated by that awful endotracheal tube. Even though a glance at the monitor told her Katie’s vital signs were normal, she was still a frightful sight, and one that Nic didn’t want to see. She stepped back and turned, looking at Jeannie as she began walking back the way she came. “I have no business here, Jeannie. This isn’t my sister. I’m an only child.”

Not bothering to wait for a reply, Nic began running back toward the SICU doors, eager to get back into the real world and away from this madness. She found Rae in the lounge. “Can we please go?”

“Is everything okay?” Rae asked as she hurried to match Nic’s pace.

“No, it’s not. I need to get away from here. I have no obligations to that woman, Rae. The only thing we share is a common thread of DNA, and that’s not enough to get me involved in her sordid life.”

“Okay, okay,” Rae said, patting Nic’s back again.

“Just please take me home, Rae. Please?”

Simon pulled his Ford into the underground parking garage beneath the headquarters of the Happy and Healthy Pharmacy, LLC, and parked it beside his Lexus. He’d returned the borrowed car he’d driven to the attorney’s office and eliminated the garage attendant who’d lent it to him. Katie Finan was finally dead, and Simon now could go about his business without further distractions.

As he walked to the elevator, he had a bounce in his step and hummed as he used his key to call the elevator. Once inside, he again used his key to direct the elevator down, into the floor below ground that very few people knew existed.

The door opened into a corridor, a cube-shaped area only large enough to accommodate the elevator doors, two other tall, wide, solid doors that stood closed before him, and a hand truck that carried supplies. To his left was the narcotics storage area for the Happy and Healthy Pharmacies, all thirty of them in operation in the Philadelphia area. Twice weekly, shipments of controlled substances arrived and were stored in the vault behind that door until they were distributed to each of his stores.

He always kept a week’s supply on hand, in the event of a hurricane or other emergency that shut down the avenues of supply that kept his business running. Depending on the day, between 750,000 and 3,000,000 tablets of controlled substances were stored here, with a potential street value of $15,000,000. Unfortunately, Simon wasn’t selling those pills on the street. One day, when he was ready to skip town, he would consider raiding the narcotics vault, but only if the police were already suspicious. If they weren’t, the simultaneous disappearance of him and all those drugs would definitely arouse their interest in him.

Simon turned away from the vault and keyed the lock of an even more secure area. After passing through the doorway, he then opened two more locks and entered the lab. It was here Simon made his money, where the legitimate pills that arrived in those bottles in the vault were smashed into powder, adulterated with other chemicals, and then pressed again into the tablets sold in the pharmacy and on the streets.

The concept was really simple—so basic he’d made his first narcotics tablets when he was in pharmacy school. He’d gained the trust of his father-in-law, who saw him for the bright and ambitious young man he was, and was given a tremendous amount of responsibility for the three stores he had then. Simon was only a twenty-year-old clerk, but even then he understood the value of the narcotics and set about finding a way to capitalize on his unique opportunity.

Simon knew about the manufacturing of pills—they all learned it in school. He began combining basic drugs with binding ingredients and fillers that he could get his hands on—diphenhydramine, glycerin, and cornstarch—and he carefully mixed his first batch of counterfeit cold medication. It was a paste, which he pressed into an empty lip-balm tube, and after it dried for several days, he held in his hands a solid roll of medication, which promptly shattered when he attempted to free it from the cylinder. It took more experimentation to figure out how to actually remove it and then how to cut the final product so it resembled a pill. In the end, though, he manufactured what would pass as a genuine tablet.

After playing around in his basement lab with other medications, he finally worked up the nerve to remove tablets of oxycodone from the pharmacy. He couldn’t very well give a patient half a bottle of legitimate medicine and half counterfeit. Even the most trusting person, if they noticed the difference, would be concerned. So he took twelve tablets, which was the number doctors commonly prescribed, and crushed and adulterated and recast them into new tabs, each with slightly less oxycodone than the originals. When they were dry, he smuggled them back into the pharmacy in a Happy and Healthy Pharmacy bottle. He waited for the right opportunity, and when he saw it, he made the switch. A college student with a legitimate prescription, one whose wisdom teeth were no longer in their sockets, took home Simon’s first batch of homemade oxycodone.

Simon couldn’t sleep for days, worried that someone would discover his scam. But when three days went by and no one arrested or fired him, he decided to act again, this time creating twenty-four pills from twelve. Half left the Happy and Healthy Pharmacy in the hands of another dental patient, and he sold the remainder to a drug addict for fifty bucks.

When he calculated the total hours he’d labored to produce those twenty-four tablets, including those early fumbled attempts, he concluded the hourly wage for the production of his product was about five cents. This number wasn’t discouraging, however. He’d already improved his process since his first trial, and he was constantly perfecting his operation. The twenty-four tablets, and the fifty dollars, were only the beginning.

Over the years, his operation expanded tremendously, to the current state overseen by a pharmacist, who wasn’t likely to kill people by substituting dangerous chemicals when their stock ran low, as he’d known street dealers to do. His pharmacist worked three evenings a week, arriving at headquarters just after the staff of accountants and secretaries and computer people had left for the day. He’d descend into his subterranean lab, and, using additives like ibuprofen and diphenhydramine (to mimic some of the natural properties of the oxycodone) he’d transform 140,000 pills a week into a slightly larger number. Their margin was eight percent. The roughly 150,000 tablets his pharmacist created in the lab all contained ninety-two percent of the drug their labels claimed.

The originals were all replaced and sold to unsuspecting customers at the Happy and Healthy Pharmacies. The extra 11,000 tabs were Simon’s, and he distributed them to a carefully chosen network of sales people throughout the area. His return was about $25,000 a week on these illegal drugs. He could increase his profits, he knew, by reducing the oxycodone content per tablet, but that would increase the risk of discovery. He could also pay his pharmacist and his distributors less. But he wasn’t buying just their loyalty, but also their intelligence. They understood that they were well compensated, and, like him, they were cautious. None of them were greedy, and that was why they were still in business almost twenty years later. Other than Billy, they’d all done their jobs well.

He shook his head at the thought of Billy, forcing away the anger at his betrayal. Billy had been with him from the beginning, when he was just using a hand-turned candy machine to crank out pills. He’d taken bigger risks in those days—transforming a bottle of a thousand tablets into two thousand during long, sleepless nights. Billy had been his neighbor growing up, and he was the one Simon turned to when he needed someone to push the drugs. Billy did well, most of the time, and he’d never made much trouble. Until now, anyway, but that was over. Billy and Katie were both dead, and the secrets they knew would be kept forever.

Business had grown tremendously since that time. From the first candy press he’d purchased during his college days, he’d graduated to state-of-the-art machinery run by computers. Now, a large machine crushed the ingredients into a fine powder, precisely adding the fillers in the quantities the pharmacist specified. Another machine pressed the mixture into pills. They were air dried and sprayed with a coating and came out looking nearly identical to the original products, so much so that even Simon had a hard time distinguishing between the authentic and the counterfeit.

“How is everything?” he asked his pharmacist.

“No problems tonight.”

“That’s good to hear.”

Simon reached into his pocket and removed a wad of cash, handing the man $5,000. Not bad for three days’ work, considering he also drew a $100,000 salary for an imaginary job in the pharmacy up on the street level of this building. Not bad at all.

Not even the combined powers of nicotine and alcohol could give Nic the gift of peace she desperately needed. The ride home from the hospital had been understandably quiet, that fateful moment at her front door even more awkward than the typical conclusion of a first date. What could have been a wonderful time with Rae had disintegrated into a disaster, and she saw no way to repair the damage of their evening. Who went on a first date to an art museum and ended up in the hospital because her date’s long-lost sister (who happened to be a suspect in a homicide) had just been shot? Nic laughed as she thought about it, figuring at least Rae would have a good story to impress future dates.
Worst date ever? No question about that one. We started out at the Barnes and ended up at the intensive-care unit…”

Nic swirled her glass, noting with remorse that not much Ketel and tonic remained, mostly just ice. As much as she’d like another, she’d regret it tomorrow. All at once the alcohol would catch up with her, and she’d pass out and find herself in this same balcony chair in the morning, stiff and cold and with a pounding headache. Instead of another drink, she leaned back and thought about why she wanted one.

How was she feeling? Angry, confused, bitter, and perhaps even a bit frightened. With whom was she angry? The Finans, for sure. She presumed they were both dead, but she wished they were alive so she could enjoy a brief moment of pleasure by giving them a piece of her mind. Who in the world separated twins? Why hadn’t they just given both children to the Coussarts if they couldn’t afford to raise both of them? It wouldn’t have been a sacrifice for her parents to have two girls. In fact, it probably would have made their life much easier, for Nic would have had a playmate and not have spent her childhood pestering them. And they’d offered to take both. Jeannie had told her that. How could the Finans be that selfish?

And to never tell Katie she was adopted was unbelievable as well. Nic could understand keeping that information from her as a child, but didn’t they understand the medical consequences of genetics? What if their mother had breast cancer or some other treatable-if-detected disease? Nic had submitted to genetic testing when it became commercially available, to help ease some of her concerns, but she’d considered that option only because she knew she was adopted. Thankfully, her testing revealed no unwanted surprises and, instead of fear, filled her with relief.

Nic supposed the way Katie had turned out proved the Finans were awful parents, and each time she reviewed it in the courtroom of her mind she found more evidence to support her verdict. The Finans were jerks.